Pressable Reviews

Founded in 2010, Pressable offers managed WordPress hosting to both small and big websites, creating a scalable and secure hosting platform for businesses and developers.

Some of the features include automatic updates, nightly backup, and traffic scaling. The sites that they host are also automatically optimized for peak performance, and a support team that’s available 24/7.

All plans include features like: Content Delivery Network provider, dedicated WordPress support, staging sites (one-click cloning tool to create a test environment), daily backups, and a “watchtower” feature that can monitor and block attempts by attacks.

About Pressable

Pressable is a service for WordPress hosting emphasizing customer service and usability for new and smaller sites, as well as scalability for larger sites experiencing traffic spikes.

Any site on Pressable, no matter what the plan, is “automatically optimized,” company officials say, for peak performance standards. The system itself is built to handle “20x your daily traffic at all times,” company officials say, for those times you’re featured on TechCrunch or CNN.

As most all hosting companies do Pressable handles all security and software updates automatically, and all sites are backed up nightly at no additional fee.

The company offers the services of a customer service staff, and mentions that they were recently rated “#1 in customer service.” Product packages are divided into three categories, one for WordPress developers, freelancers and agency clients, another for sales and marketing and business development users, and a third for education, enterprise and government customers.

It’s on the expensive side for the more basic plans, a sign that the company is usually more interested in the large-scale clientele. All customers get Content Delivery Network at no additional cost, and sites can add SSL for only $10 per month per certificate. Pressable partners with Google PageSpeed to offer increased loading speed.

FAQ's

Does Pressable offer 24/7 support?

Not at this time, no. They do “work late into the night,” company officials say, “and our morning crew starts at 8am. We do have support during the weekend, however staffing is not as robust as during the week.” New help desk tickets can be submitted online after you log into your control panel at https://my.pressable.com.

What’s a Content Delivery Network, and do I get one?

All Pressable sites’ assets are offloaded to a CDN, company officials say, specifically “Max CDN, a premium CDN provider.” It’s a distributed network of servers used only for delivering such assets as images and graphics, JavaScripts, downloadable files and software. So whenever a visitor hits your site, the CDN delivers the content from the server closest to the visitor to improve site speed and keep traffic surges minimal.

Do they support multi-sites?

No they don’t. As company officials explain, “we don’t support multi-sites for any of our standard plans and we don’t support domain mapping in any way. If you already have an established network setup, are using it correctly, and use subfolder directories, we could certainly draft up a custom proposal for you.”

Do they take care of migration for me?

They can migrate a current WordPress site to their systems. You need to log in to my.pressable.com and click on the name of the project you want migrated over. Click on the ‘Import Site’ icon, fill out the form and you’re good to go.

Are certain plugins required for all sites on Pressable?

Yes. These plugins are automatically installed and cannot be removed:

Batcache. This uses Memcached to store and serve rendered pages.

Never Email Passwords. With NEP, new user passwords are never emailed. No one knows the generated password, and only the customer will know her password once she uses the reset link.

nginx – Allows pretty permalinks and other WP features to function properly on nginx.

Disable Welcome Email – Prevents the “New WordPress Site” e-mail from being sent out

WP SMTP Config– This plugin configures WordPress and WordPress MU to use a SMTP server when sending emails instead of the default PHP mail() function.

I heard they install Akismet too, what’s that?

Yes, they give Akismet to all WordPress customers and don’t recommend you remove it. Akismet is a hosted web service that saves you time by automatically detecting comment and trackback spam. Pressable hosts it and gives you access through the plugin, pre-configured, so you don’t have to pay for it.

Do they register domains for customers?

You know, they used to, but they don’t anymore, since most customers want to control their domain under their own accounts. It’s easy enough to do on GoDaddy.com, eNom.com or places like that. If you want you can submit a ticket via your my.pressable.com control panel and they’ll help you with any other questions about domains.

Can I point more than one domain to my Pressable site?

Sure, it’s easy to set up. First direct your DNS to Pressable, and either point your nameservers to them or point an A record to them as well as add a CNAME as listed in your my.pressable.com account. Log in to my.pressable.com and click on the website you wish to direct your domain at, scroll to the bottom of your dashboard and find the Additional Domains settings.

What are their backup procedures?

They back your site up every day, your database for two weeks and content for the last two days. You should still make your own manual backup, they have a tutorial showing you how to do that. If you need to recover something just send them a support ticket.

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